Klobuchar tells NBC she wants to 'move forward,' not dwell on the past, when pressed on Biden comments
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., rebuffed two questions on Sunday about former President Biden's remarks in multiple interviews this week, arguing that the party should be moving forward rather than looking back on where they went wrong in 2024.
NBC's "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker asked the senator about Biden blaming Harris' loss on sexism and racism. Pressed on whether the lesson Democrats will take from the 2024 election is that they shouldn't put a woman at the top of the ticket, Klobuchar rejected the idea.
"I hope not. You have seen women run other countries quite well. Angela Merkel comes to mind in Germany. And you’ve also seen women in the U.S., incredible mayors, incredible governors. I look in the Senate for Democrats in the last election — three of the four races where we beat the presidential ticket were women running in Michigan, women running in Nevada, women running in Wisconsin. I mean, this happens. So I just, I don’t think that’s a lesson to learn. I know it’s not easy running as a woman. If it was, we could play the game, pick your favorite woman president. You can’t," Klobuchar said.
The Democratic lawmaker said the party shouldn't be looking backwards.
"But I think the president understands there’s been sexism — President Biden does — but to me, I just want to move forward, and we’ve got incredible candidates across the board running at all levels of government, so let's work on helping the American people, instead of looking backwards. Instead of looking at what happened years ago, I want to look at the now, and people need our help," she said.
Earlier in the discussion, Welker asked about Biden's insistance that it didn't matter that he dropped out of the race in July, only giving former Vice President Kamala Harris about 90 days to campaign.
"You know, everything we look at in a rearview mirror after you lose an election. Yes, we would have been served better by a primary, but we are where we are. We’re not on the history channel right now, and I believe that President Biden can come out and speak and do interviews whenever he wants, but I will say this. We’re not in the ‘History Channel’ and our Republican colleagues, instead of dealing with where we are now, think they’re in some kind of a way back zone, that they can go bring time backwards and blame everything on Joe Biden. Donald Trump is the president right now, and we have to deal with helping the American people," Klobuchar said.
BIDEN BLASTS TRUMP AS ‘FOOLISH’ APPEASER OF RUSSIA, SAYS FIRST 100 DAYS WERE NO TRIUMPH
CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF MEDIA AND CULTURE
"My party, we want to focus on lowering costs and finding new ways to build more housing and get more affordable energy and really working with our entrepreneurs all over the country to seize on this moment that we have with everything from mapping the human genome to AI, to actually expanding more small businesses, not retracting them like this president is doing. So I’m not interested in going backward in time. I’m interested in going forward," the senator continued.
Biden told the BBC this week that it didn't matter when he dropped out of the race because Harris was a fully-funded candidate.